McKinney blows, Vose goes in VA Final

Billy Vose and the MPS Hayabusa kept it together while Eric McKinney’s bike blew up just before the beams in the PDRA PXM final at Virginia Motorsports Park. “We knew it was hurt, but Eric wasn’t going to let out….not with Billy in the other lane,” said Eric’s dad Scott. Interview with Vose and Bike owner Mike Thyen coming soon.

“We had a slow start to qualifying due to a new rear tire,” said Dan Rudd of MPS. “These Mickey Thompson tires need multiple burnouts and a couple of runs to start working. In Q1 the bike spun really hard and only went a disappointing 4.21. For Q2, Mike made the appropriate changes to the tune-up and the bike left better but shut off mysteriously in 2nd gear. Now we have a gremlin to worry about, along with being on the bump spot. With only one more qualifying run left Saturday morning it was crunch time. After much discussion, we were pretty confident we knew the origin of our electrical issue. In Q3 Billy ran straight and true and under power the whole track to a 4.153 at 171.69mph, good enough for the #6 qualifying spot.

“Winning the first round, we ran a 4.162 @ 172.17 to the troubled 4.35 of Terry “Milk Man” Schweigert. For the semi final our opponent was Ronnie Procopio, who had just ran a 4.12 and had lane choice. We were still struggling with the first part of the racetrack. We needed to straighten that out very quickly or our day could end in the semis. Mike decided to swing for the fence with the rationale that we had to get to the final to win it. Billy killed the tree with an .008 light and tore up the track with a 4.088 at 172.94. Here we are going to our second final of the year against the McKinney team. This time the opponent would be Eric McKinney. We had lane choice with our .08 to his .09 in the semi. This was going to be an epic race. Billy left first by .018 and never looked back! Billy runs 4.11 at 172.32 to McKinney’s 4.17 (at only 146) to take the win!

“We were scheduled to run 5 PDRA events this year, with the Virginia event to be our third. I guess we aren’t going to win any attendance awards, but when we are present we do make them count! Winning the only PDRA race we have entered was a great win for our team!

“We would also like to thank all our other parts suppliers without whom we could not race. Thanks to Kevin at Lectron Fuel Systems for the awesome new “Injectrons”, Tim at Holley EFI, Ray at MSD Ignition, Jay at APE, Snake & RC at CP-Carrillo, Bill at Robinson Industries, Kerry at Crower, Lori, Debbie, and Melissa at Web Cam, Mike at Cometic, Go Go at Nitrous Express, Kurt at Millennium Technology, Will at Kibblewhite Precision Machining, Carl at ARC, Eric at MTC Engineering, Dave at Worldwide Bearings, Dawn at Bates Leathers, Hot Rod Chrissy and Tim Hailey for her awesome photos, and last but not least Brandi at Dragbike.com for the great coverage of our sport.“

EARLIER: McKinney vs Vose in VA Final

Eric McKinney ran another 4.09 to take out Jay Fisher (far lane) in the PXM semi at PDRA Virginia. Problem for McKinney is that multi-million time champ Billy Vose snagged lane choice with a 4.08 in the other semi. Should be an excellent final coming up, tune in to the live feed.

EARLIER: EVERY E1 PXM pass in VA is an Upset!

Have you ever seen a ladder like this, with the entire top half of the field gone in E1??

#2 qualifier Travis Davis lost more spectacularly than everyone else, but the ENTIRE top half of the PXM field is out in round 1

I posted earlier that there was no way that #1 qualifier Ashley Owens could lose to teammate Eric McKinney without team orders suspicion…”There is no scenario”… I walked around saying….but I hadn’t considered a scenario where the ENTIRE top half of the ladder lost….but what a show Team McKinney put on! Both bikes ran 4.090! It was a .014 difference at the tree what scored the win for McKinney.

EARLIER: McKinney and Owens in E1 Match-up

How did team McKinney allow this to happen? Eric McKinney was struggling with an underperforming motor on Friday, then swapped to a killer that spun him out of the groove this morning. While Eric was nearly getting bumped from the field by Casey Stemper, Ashley Owens saw Terry Schweigert slow and figured his bike would slow to. Not so much. Owens instead improved to a 5.05 and knocked Travis Davis off the top of the chart, setting up a round 1 match-up with teammate McKinney. “We’re gonna let them race,” said team owner Scott McKinney, Eric’s father. And I believe him….but if Eric gets out of round 1, few will give him credit.